Fellow vagri,

2024 is coming to its inevitable end and so we are closing the books on this year’s adventures as well. For this occasion, we thought we’d look back on the past year and list some of the things that happened around Vagrus before signing off.

How It Started

We kicked off 2024 with a post about our plans for the year. In retrospect, wanting to release smaller bits of content at intervals while developing two very content-heavy DLCs with our tiny writing team was wishful thinking. Why it did not exactly pan out like that also involved a lot of other factors, like the many, many other aspects of the game we’ve worked hard to improve. Also, it seems that there’s no such thing as “smaller bits of content” when it comes to Vagrus. With millions of words worth of written content behind us, everything is interconnected and adding things can be very tricky. Also, players now expect meaty additions, so just any odd small story just won’t cut it. Still, this effort gave us Clandestine, so it was not in vain.

With an eventful year drawing to a satisfying close, we here at Lost Pilgrims would like to wish you all Happy Holidays! We hope you have a chance to take a break from whatever it is you do, get some rest, and, of course, spend some time with your family or loved ones. With our latest region DLC, At the Heart of Ruin, deep in development as well as other projects in their early beginnings, next year is set to be an explosive one at Lost Pilgrims – for now, however, we must rest, too.

Vagri! We’re sure many of you’ve been waiting for more information about our next DLC (shaping up to be expansion-sized once again) and the time has come to deliver just that – in the form of a special story trailer we’re excited to share:

So, there you have it. Some exposition delivered by award-winning voice actor Phil Rowe, along with a title reveal and the year of release. Although the latter is fairly vague, we can already say that we are aiming for the first half of 2025, as we’ve been working on it very diligently for months now. There’s still a lot to go, but we’re making good progress and we’re very satisfied with how it’s shaping up. Can you guess where it’ll be set? There are quite a few indicators, we think.

This week’s post covers the creation of our painted Campaign Map and the interactive Chart, starting from their humblest beginnings in our creative director’s tabletop role-playing game materials to their eventual manifestation in-game, covered by a node grid and expanded with interactive options.

Beginnings

To kick it off, let’s start by taking a look at how it all began for Vagrus.

Today’s post takes a short trek down memory lane. Long, long ago, before any of the team at Lost Pilgrims sported grey hairs, we set about creating the UI for the game – an indubitably difficult ask for any game studio. Yet despite any trepidation, we forged forward and created one of the first renditions of Vagrus’s UI.

As most of you are aware, we use a video – meant as a kind of introduction to Vagrus – at the top of our store page. While this feature is exclusive to Steam, we have been meaning to replace it with a more up-to-date version for a while now. The old one with Kormakr was a fine video, but a lot has changed about the game since its creation, be they options available to a comitatus, the UI, and even content.

Well, one lost pilgrim to be precise. On 7th September, I was fortunate to have participated in Fighting Fantasy Fest 5 in the UK, representing Lost Pilgrims there in exhibiting the City of Thieves graphic novel I’ve been working on with Chameleon Comix’s founder Gyula Szűcs and mega-talented graphic artist Krisztián Balla. We met and chatted with a lot of enthusiastic Fighting Fantasy fans, encountered living legends, listened to intriguing talks, and saw a ton of cool stuff, including the new gamebook The Dungeon on Blood Island by Sir Ian Livingstone himself.

Hey everyone,

So Steam has updated its policies related to games sold on the platform, eliminating direct links from one page to another. This means that our main Vagrus page can no longer link to our Demo (Prologue) and vice versa. Before this was the case, we had our Demo (Prologue) set up as a different application, whereas now we must enable the Demo (Prologue) store page beneath the main game.

New or Updated Features

• You can now double-click to move on the campaign map.
• Revamped key bindings: defaults have been changed to be more intuitive and grouped by topics or UI categories, and new hotkeys have been added.
• The Leadership Perk “Command” has been reworked: it now unlocks all advanced Crew Combat actions passively and when Resourcefulness is spent, it raises Combat Strength and Defense by 15% as well as turns Critical Failure rolls to Failure.
• The effects of multiple “Terrifying” Perks no longer stack. Stacking caused Skills that target multiple positions with characters with the Perk to be close to useless.
• You can now butcher Beasts and Mounts directly at your Outpost instead of having to move them to the comitatus.
• You no longer lose Mounts when Fighters leave you during Events (ie. Outriders do not take their Mounts) for narrative reasons.

This week we’re taking a look at an illustrative cross-section of recent feedback we’ve received about the game and highlighting some of the changes that are coming as a result. We pride ourselves on iterating Vagrus and improving the game at every chance we get, even if we can’t always fulfill the more extreme requests of our players and reviewers.